I was so lucky I had the opportunity to attend Paleo f(x) in Austin last weekend. Austin holds a special place in my heart because I grew up right outside of the city in a town called Round Rock. So when I saw the conference was being held there, and my parents could watch the littles for us it was a WIN WIN. Not to mention my favorite ice cream place is there, Lick Ice Cream, but unfortunately we didn’t make it there during the right hours…waaahhhhhh!!!! I did make up for missing my ice cream by eating at a local nose to tail restaurant called Salted Sow. All I have to say about that is triple fried duck fat fries. The world was good again.

I heard a lot of amazing speakers and got to see a lot of my favorite bloggers face to face. I got 4 new books and 1 new cookbook even though I wanted about 20 more I restrained myself. I’m currently reading Sexy by Nature by Stephani Ruper and it’s pretty awesome. Having a daughter of my own really puts things in perspective on how I represent myself, and if I’m modeling the behavior to aspire her to have soaring confidence. That could be a big lengthy topic in of itself so I really think you should check out her page or listen to this really great podcast where she is interviewed by Liz Wolfe (I got to meet her!).

So what I thought I would do was highlight a few of the sessions I attended and give you a brief summary of what I took away. It was really hard to choose between some of the speakers/topics because they had multiple things going at once (you can see the picture of the schedule of the days below).

Dan Pardi This guy spoke on why we gain fat. Did you know there is a 260% increase in obesity between 1968-2009. CRAZY! Highly processed food makes you eat more calories before you’re full. Word. We all know that we can be “full” or not even hungry but eat a whole bag of processed xyz and not even think twice. There is a clue it’s not real food! He was also real big on sleep. Decrease in sleep drives overeating, and decrease in self control. Sleep definitely was a recurring theme in many of the talks over the entire weekend. He’s got a free e-book called Why We Gain Fat and How do We Lose It? Go check him out.

Panel discussion including Ben Greenfield about hacking stress – What are 5 things you loved doing as a kid? GO DO THEM! -REM rehab ebook -Sensory deprivation tanks -10 day vipassana course (this keeps coming up in different areas of my life…maybe I need to go?)

This lady has amazing story for reversing MS using a Paleo style diet. She has a TEDx talk on youtube you can check out. She’s big on sulfur rich vegetables, lots of color and variety, and greens. She’s got a whole protocol in her book, The Wahl’s Protocol. It’s not just limited to helping people with MS, it can help many things. There were many speakers at the conference who were there because of a paleo diet reversing their XYZ problem. This works people! Go back to the basics and they way our bodies were designed to eat!

LOVED this guy! He is funny and had a great simplistic way of working the paleo lifestyle into the whole family. He talked over sleep and tuning into the natural light cycles. So that means using no artificial lights after bedtime. Use candles, tea lights or lanterns (fun for the kids!). He also talked about movement. Move a lot! Avoid sitting at all, squat, lift things, do short intense burst of movement, take family walks, and create opportunities to move in the house. Have a balance beam, make obstacle course. I loved this concept, and we plan to make our living room of our new house full of opportunities to move so no furniture! Lastly he talked about eating paleo with kids.

This lady has helped thousands of people diagnosed with Austism just by changing their diet (again, a recurring theme here). Did you know that the current stats are 1 in 88 children are diagnosed with autism!?! 1 in 54 boys. THIS.IS.MADNESS. I never knew anyone with autism when I was growing up, let alone didn’t even hear the term until the past decade. She has established a correlation with Maganese in the diet of these children and has a specific protocol to remove it. She has established the No Harm Foundation.

I learned about hyperthermic conditioning from this lady. Pretty amazing benefits can occur when you can get in the sauna for at least 20 minutes two times per week. Check out this video and blog she did over at the 4 hour work week. I’ve never been a sauna girl but have been doing hot yoga for the past year and really love it. It makes me feel good to at least be moving and listening to some tunes while I’m sweating. Sitting still in a hot sauna would drive me nuts I’m pretty sure.

This is just a few of tid bits from the sessions I attended. If I typed my notes from everything I’d be here a LONG time. I hope you can find some of these links to be helpful and maybe you can join me next year!

I deleted the other days by accident, but at least you can see an idea of the schedule